Scarlett is a smart and stylish British writer who has hit that sweet spot at the juncture of literary and commercial fiction. But she started out writing mysteries, with a (no surprise) smart and stylish series character, a quirky-funny university lecturer in crime fiction named Lily Pascale. We described Lily as “the coolest thing to step out of London since Bridget Jones,” and sent her off in a series of three books for the U.S. market, the last of which was Seaside. It’s also the darkest of the three, with a case involving a murdered twin in a spooky empty beach town shuttered for the off-season.